A Woman Wrapped in Silence

People want me to explain my attitude to Our Lady. Well,
I approach Our Lady with awe and love. And because she's
a human being like you and me, I say to myself, what
faith!

When the angel told her about becoming the Mother of God
she responded, fiat! Fiat is sort of a Boom Yes!
God's reverberations. So big we still talk about it. She
did this when she was about fourteen years old. I was
married at fifteen so I can kind of sympathize. But what
got me is her complete supernatural acceptance of God's
will

Have I got that kind of faith? There are days when I
think I have faith but then I look at her and I say to
myself why don't I pray for more faith? Lord, I believe,
help my unbelief.

Just think about that strange, incredible, unbelievable
faith of a young girl. At fourteen years old she became
the Mother of God and the Mother of men. She knew full
well that people would not understand that she had
conceived by the Holy Spirit. For a long time after her
marriage to Joseph she must have been the talk of the
town. In those days the women used to wash their linens
in ponds. When she brought her linen I'm sure people
began to whisper about her. I can just see those gossipy
women. But Our Lady never said anything. She was the
woman wrapped in silence.

Slowly, very slowly, something is coming back to us.
People want to go apart and be silent so as to hear the
footsteps of God and his voice. People are beginning to
go back to Our Lady, the woman who said fiat so
that God could become man.

Fiat. Do I say fiat? Why is it that we are unable to say
fiat again and again and again? What is it that stops us
from being who we are, namely Christians, followers of
Christ. We don't want to be proclaimed as a Catholic too
much. But we've got to get this faith right out. It's
something that you pass on.

"As I have done, so you must do." (John 13:15) That's
what Christ said after he washed the feet of his
apostles. We've got to get deep into what it is to wash
feet. We've got to get deep into what it is to be poor.
We have to get deep into what it means to pray. And we
can find all this in Our Lady. She will teach us.

When she held her son in her arms when he was dead and
she had been given to Saint John, she became the Mother
of men as well as the Mother of God. So I come to her
and I kneel at her feet and there are not words because
she's always silent. But her silence speaks. And she
seems to get up and take me by the hand as if to bring
me into the next moon. She brings me to her spouse, the
Holy Spirit,

And remember what the Holy Spirit is here for. Christ
said, "I will send you an advocate who will explain to
you (as lawyers do - advocate means a lawyer) all the
things that I have taught you." (John 14:26) He realized
that his apostles were not exactly brilliant and that
they needed a lot of explanation about a lot of things.
So he sent the Holy Spirit, the one who overshadowed his
mother. That's what we have. A woman wrapped in silence
who lives in the Holy Spirit, in God the Father and God
the Son.

So we can turn to her in grave humility and say to her,
"Look, you are one of us. Teach us the height to which
we can rise. We can't bear Christ, but we can be
pregnant with love for every human being, men and women
alike in giving life to other people. Mother, teach us
how to do it. Teach us how to say 'yes' to the
impossible."